Posted
by
msmash
on Monday March 20, 2017 @10:00AM
from the worrisome-patterns dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: People worried about college affordability today can at least take this to heart: it could get much, much worse. Tuition has been rising by about 6% annually, according to investment management company Vanguard. At this rate, when babies born today are turning 18, a year of higher education at a private school -- including tuition, fees, and room and board -- will cost more than $120,000, Vanguard said. Public colleges could average out to $54,000 a year. That means without financial aid, the sticker price of a four-year college degree for children born today could reach half a million dollars at private schools, and a quarter million at public ones. That's for a family with one kid; those with more could be facing a bill that reaches seven figures.

There is nothing that college can teach you that can't be learned on the internet for free. Every syllabus, every textbook, every lecture, every lab exercise... already at your finger tips. You are paying a college to provide certification of knowledge, not the knowledge itself.

$500,000 invested wisely into a moderately aggressive portfolio at age 18 would make you extremely wealthy at retirement age. Why waste it on a college education that may or may not get you a job, and even if it does it will likely never earn you as much money as the original cost invested wisely?

but the typical student isn't taking a lump sum of $500,000 and paying off the education immediately at 18 years old. He/she is going into debt with loans, and doesn't have half a million to spend on either education or a stock portfolio at that age.

This is what subsidized guaranteed loans get you! It does not get you "access for all" it gets you steadily rising costs divorced from the rest of the market and inflation until even the state can't afford to "make college affordable." We are seeing the same crap going on in health care.

The simple fact there is high percentage of people who if at 18 years of age with no assets are allowed to borrow 1/2 a million even at 2 or 3 percent APR, will never be able to return the principle let alone settle the debt. This uncontrolled cost structure will simply bankrupt our state and federal student loan programs.

Quite honestly if someone at 18 could borrow a 1/2 million I would probably be better advice to lever in on capital investing in the form of stock portfolio than for education.

The ONLY answer is to eliminate loan subsidies and force colleges to deliver an suitable education product at a price people can afford.

This is a ridiculous extrapolation; doing the same to health care costs means that health care and education will each be several hundred percent of our GDP in 18 years.

The cost of education is driven by the federal student loan program, the expansion of middle management, and the development of luxury dorms and gyms. I think it's transparent that such costs cannot continue to expand at the same rate for the next 18 years.

Federal loans are a small part of it. Many educational loans are private loans. And guess what - you can't discharge them in bankruptcy, so the lenders have very little incentive to not throw money at you.

Some of it was caused by Mom&Dad being able to take out cheap home equity loans on their homes. The crash in 2008 kind of brought some of that to an end.

A lot of schools have gotten into "amenity wars". To attract students, they build ever fancier dorms and facilities. And yes, it does attract, but at a cost. As long as there is no pushback from the potential students that the costs are too high, schools will continue to act like this.

And finally, not every student pays sticker price. Many pay far less than that - it depends on family income.

loans are guaranteed by the Federal government, the same government that works in tandem with the Federal Reserve Bank to create money out of thin air. Half a million in 18 years? Sure, why not, maybe sooner. In the free market the cost of education is falling, technology allows for cheaper ways to communicate and test knowledge. In the government world costs never go down, that's not good for the government for costs to go down.

I suspect administration is the biggest factor here, at least assuming trends in the US have been anything like those here in the UK.

I still get the quarterly newsletter from my old college (usually accompanied by requests for donations of varying subtlety). What's been clear looking at these over the years is just how sharply the size of the administration function has increased since I was there. I did a quick and dirty estimate around 12 months ago, provoked by a particularly aggressive thrust of the beg

This is a ridiculous extrapolation; doing the same to health care costs means that health care and education will each be several hundred percent of our GDP in 18 years.

The cost of education is driven by the federal student loan program, the expansion of middle management, and the development of luxury dorms and gyms. I think it's transparent that such costs cannot continue to expand at the same rate for the next 18 years.

Unless we find a way to get insurance companies out of health care it probably will cost more than our GDP to pay for health care each year. We will become ever greater in debt.

That means without financial aid, the sticker price of a four-year college degree for children born today could reach half a million dollars at private schools, and a quarter million at public ones. That's for a family with one kid; those with more could be facing a bill that reaches seven figures.

This writer comes to the wrong conclusion. the rise in costs is related to the financial aid given.

the more money the state guarantees that colleges will get paid (regardless on if its students are successful or drop out) is what causes the costs to rise.

the solution is not even more money from the state (and the people via taxes) but to get the government out of it completely and allow the market to self correct

Bingo. These are the kind of things where people are incredibly short sighted.

"Omg, college is too expensive. We must help EVERYONE afford it!!".

Except that like anything else, if you give 100% of the population X amount of money for a specific resource, the price of that resource now goes up by X.

Then afterward we get the "omg, people are in do much debt, we should bail them out!". It's like, you caused this.

I refuse to think politicians did not know it would go that way. This was just a result of the US political system. Since "free college" was not going to swing (because lol US), they just did "college via loans", followed by "think of our indebted graduates!", which is essentially the same thing, but more underhanded (and expensive).

College costs are soaring for the same reason that health care costs are soaring: because the system is neither capitalist or socialist, but a combination of the two. When you combine the two, you don't get the best of both worlds as people assume; in reality, you get the worst of both worlds. Without even stating which system I personally favor, I propose that the two systems are incompatible.

because 538 [fivethirtyeight.com] says you're wrong, and they have sources. College started going up massively in the 90s when Clinton started cutting federal funds and shoot up like crazy when the Bush cuts hit.

Everyone seems to want to tackle this from the wrong end, with some nebulous plan to pay for peoples tuition. That doesn't solve anything, it just shifts the cost burden. I'd love to see an in depth study done on WHY universities continue to increase costs.

I suspect (and my bias is obvious here) that a significant part of the increase comes from spending on athletic programs (a local university here just spent close to $10m on a new athletics complex, which was only half funded by donations and alumni - so

A few skills, such as software engineering, can be already acquired 100% online. In two decades, VR will make majority of high education possible to acquire without human labor, or with help of professors from parts of the world with low cost of living. At this point, we will probably just fund the remaining costs like we do for K-12 schools.

Oh sure, ultra rich will keep their private colleges with dorms, football teams and fraternities. These things will just be understood to have nothing to do with educat

Putting a bunch of people in VR-space with all the resources in the world generally teaches them nothing. Otherwise we wouldn't need universities, you'd just rent the books from the library and then pay the exam boards to sit your degree.

Aside from the lectures, which are just by-rote education that could be replaced, you have to assess, understand, inspire, assist and generally be useful to the students. That's why the biggest expensive of education is generally staffing. Those Dr's, PhD's, Professors, etc. don't come cheap, and their time in teaching is limited (you buy them off by making them teach in exchange for being provided facilities and funding for their research).

Given that, it's a human-hungry industry, resources are secondary. Almost all universities today publish their entire courses online, with all the materials and all the coursework. They were doing it when I did a degree almost 20 years ago (back then it was all on the FTP server, which everyone had a login to and quite a lot was available publicly).

And you can't just assign twice as many students to the same staff, you would need to hire more staff, who all need to be educated too.

If you think that any part of education is about providing reading material and then letting kids and/or adults just get on with it, you severely misunderstand how the world works.

In fact, if anything, all those dorms, teams and frats are the anti-thesis of education and likely the first thing to go. No other country does the last two with any seriousness, for instance. You don't get to Oxford just because you're a decent rower.

If anything, education's future is firmly in being available offline. Sure, you can do online degrees, but they are held in contempt for the most part. The online parts are secondary to the whole purpose and who's going to pay more than the bare minimum for them to reprint last year's PDF just to sit an online degree that's worthless?

You can modernise it - providing video streams to an lecturer or assistant for one-to-one sessions, but you don't need less people, actually you need more to do that.

1. An explosion in admin staff.2. A resort-like building and activity culture.3. A guaranteed flow of a lot of income via student loans.

People leaving college with $100k in debt is already becoming a serious problem and the prospects are dismal for many majors. Political support is already turning slowly against universities and their culture for these reasons. If it gets to the point where $100k in debt is normal, you can expect a few things...

If #3 happens, it will be a race-related claim initially and not be relief granted to the general population.

I think the easier solution is to lower the bar for bankruptcy discharge of student loan debt or imposed reductions during bankruptcy.

The devil will be in the details to keep it from becoming abused, but if lenders face increased risks on debt discharge they will end up loaning less money and force educational institutions to figure out how to charge less.

That a gallon of milk will run you about $20 and a tank of gas is $500...

BTW, College tuition is only really going wacko because the government stepped in and made student loans so easy to get. I know of folks a decade ago who were borrowing money to go to school taking the maximum allowed while living at home. They blew all the extra money on lavish vacations and other junk and are now, faced with a mountain of unnecessary debt for college degrees of minimal value. Criminal justice and business administration just doesn't pay that well. Making college money easy to get makes tuition go up, but it doesn't always make people better educated.

BTW, College tuition is only really going wacko because the government stepped in and made student loans so easy to get.

538 [fivethirtyeight.com] says you're wrong.

Did you even read the article you cited? Here's a fun excerpt (emphasis mine):

"Among for-profit institutions, it is much more difficult to pin down a reason for tuition increases, though recent research suggests that one big cause is the generosity of federal student aid: Some institutions may be raising tuition in order to capture as much government-backed money as possible."

In the USA if you do want the level of education and environment that you get for free in much of the rest of the world that is also free or essentially free. It is that people don't want that type of education experience they want the American experience and the cost that goes with it.

Then why so many foreigners in US higher education instead of free at home?

I know the reason, and if you did you would stop bragging about free college everywhere else.

Those foreigners are PhD students and their tuition is paid by the institution where they study and work. I have a lot of colleagues who did their PhD in the US, and came back to Finland, including my professor.

This makes sense if you adjust for inflation using the PCI index instead of the CPI. Using the PCI, the average household income in today's dollars of a family from the mid 1950s is close to $250k a year. This means that if you are making $50k a year today, you are only actually making about 1/5th of what your forebears did. This is why you can't afford college, this is why you have no retirment savings, this is why you and your spouse have to work, and this is why you live pay check to pay check.

We're basically getting paid slave wages, and the masters in charge have created a system of laws to prevent us from ever taking up arms to rise up... we're fucked. Watch the movie "In Time" if you want to get a glimpse into the world you've been born into, when watching the movie just replace their plot concept of "Time credits" with money and it all makes sense.

At this rate, a college degree will only be for those who have parents in that top 1%. Even if financial aid is willing to cover such costly amounts, then these students would be in debt for the rest of their lives. Also, if only the top 1% could afford college degrees, could a company that only hires people with at least a four-year degree be classified as discrimination of the middle and lower class? If someone wants to be a network admin for a large corporation, then pursuing Cisco certifications woul

The economics of universities is horribly broken. The federal government has been providing easy money to Universities via student loans. Universities are bureaucracies and like any bureaucracy will simply grow to spend the money available. The University of Texas' bureaucracy has grown to be 1 administrator for every 7 students. The faculty:student ratio is 18:1! So there are more than twice as many administrators as faculty. The square footage of the university has also doubled in the last 30 years

Even the author must recognize that a 4% real increases in college costs (after 2% inflation) cannot continue indefinitely. If that were the case, a state school that currently costs $10,000 annually would cost $500,000 annually by 2117 in today's dollars, while a private school would be a cool 2.5 million in today's dollars! Clearly, the market would correct before such a scenario ever came to pass. Even debt-funded bubbles hit a breaking point.

So the question is, how close are we to that breaking point where consumers lose their willingness to pay? I think for some less-regarded private schools, that breaking point has already been hit. Some second-tier private schools with very high tuitions have started to suffer declining enrollments. However, I think we are a long way from it with most public schools. It's also worth noting that a big driver of public school tuition inflation has been declining state support. Public support for public institutions probably won't go below zero, so there is a limit to how long those increases can be driven by declining public support.

I've already heard of smaller private schools starting to fold, but yes, I think the correction will occur once enough people start to check on the expected salary of their dream job versus the tuition. It didn't really occur to me to confirm when I enrolled, but I went to a state school so my tuition was a car payment. When my children are deciding to enroll in college or trade school we'll definitely want to compare the cost/benefit if the bubble hasn't popped yet. On the research side of college finan

The most elite Ivy League schools are essentially free to middle class students. Several of them have explicit no-loan policies for students from families making less than a very generous threshold (over $100,000 in most cases). Those who pay full freight generally aren't suffering for it. So if those country clubs will let you in, you'd be a fool to turn them down.

I have a cousin who went to one of those schools (Brandeis) a few years back for his degree in economics. His parents (a teacher and a physical therapist) didn't pay a dime. I didn't know about theses schools' policies towards qualified but middle class people until I asked his parents how they could afford it as ~$50k per year is a huge chunk of their post tax income. This cousin is 18 years younger than I am so I was curious because I have young kids and wanted to know what school cost so I knew how screwed I was going to be. That said it looks like the 4 options for getting a college education are:
1. Be rich so money doesn't matter
2. Join the US military and potentially get shot at
3. Get accepted to an elite school and be subsidized by #1
4. Milk community colleges and high school post secondary programs for as much as you can and work your ass off to pay for a state school
5. Go into hock for the rest of your life

For #2 there are some really good ways to manipulate that system that I have found out from some of my military (current and former) friends and their hate of the young double butters. For the biggest benefit become an Eagle Scout first (gets you promoted higher right out of basic ahead of the others who joined with you), join the guard/reserves at age 17, then get into college and go ROTC. When you start ROTC you will likely get promoted again in the reserves/guard at this point as well putting you ahead of your peers. You then get your commission at age 22 but you already have ~5 years of military experience but with all that other stuff you won't be an O1 so would be an O2 (first lieutenant) or more likely an O3 (captain). You then have to put in I believe 6 years as an officer if a commission is available, because you already have 5 years experience you will move way a head in the line. By the time you finish you commission you will now have about 11 years into the military so why not go the extra 9 and get a full officer's pension at age 37. Also the military will pay for college while you are in so you can continue to work on more advanced degrees for free. Toss in the tuition and stipend that you are paid for school as well as your military pay for that time and it is a pretty good deal if you don't have to go get shot at the first few years.

We turned it into yet another social contract. It's free/cheap to study over here. My whole university career has cost less than 5 grand. Including books and all. Well, I'm paying for it now. A sizable portion of my tax actually goes towards our schools and universities. Not only my tax, anyone's actually.

And that's just fine if you ask me.

What this entails is a lot. First, there is no risk involved in studying. There is no problem if you can't finish for some reason. If you make it, great, you'll earn more money and pay more tax that way. If you don't, well, so be it. No potential college debt looming overhead that you could only dream of repaying if you don't make it. Which in turn means that more students are starting and our universities can (and do) eliminate brutally anyone who isn't among the best. Those degrees actually mean something.

It's also much easier for me now to pay the price of my degree. Yes, a sizable portion of my paycheck goes to education. But I can easily afford it. Now that I have a pretty good job, in part certainly due to my degree. I couldn't even think of paying anything close to that as a student, and if I thought that I would have to pay that, I very likely would not have risked it altogether.

All in all I will most likely have paid about those 500k for my degree by the time I retire. That's ok, though, in a US model I probably would not have had the chance to study at all.

Tuition costs have been rising faster than inflation as State budgets look to shore up unbalanced budgets and slash education funding. This moves the cost of education from the State to the student. In the '80's (ad before) States covered 80% of tuition costs leaving 20% on students. Those ratios have flipped today and students now shoulder 80% of the cost of education increasing the cost to the student. The OVERALL cost to educate a student has decreased due to efficiency, automation and technology. T

1) When ever talking about numbers you need several points of comparison.For example, let's say a college education really does end up costing $500,000 in 18 years - but the average salary for a high school teacher is $400,000. It's called inflation, and you need to account for it.

2) The rate fo growth is currently high in part because of the attempt to raise stated prices in order to pay for discounted admissions for more students. The basic idea is to charge the wealthier people as much as the marke

There's a problem with that. Education begets better employment, and better employment is going to be necessary when the kinds of employment that served the United States from the 1950s through the 1980s becomes less and less an option as those kinds of jobs are simply priced-out and sent to other countries.

Unfortunately the only way to make this happen is to spend money somewhere in education. Right now we're seeing ballooning post-secondary tuition because far more people want to become students than th

The ironic thing is that this is just a US problem. The German student has his education paid for by the Fatherland. The Chinese student, similar. It is only the US that forces student loans that can't be dumped in any way.

If the US were a farm, it would be out of business in a year... even the dumbest person in agriculture that if you want a crop harvest in the fall, you have to plant seeds in the spring.

The German student needs to perform well academically to get their free ride college education. Those that do not do well at book learning or are just general fuckups are forcibly steered to the trades.

I'm ALL for standardized testing in America where it has true consequences for the student. But oddly enough, people like you who point out free education in Germany never mention that part...

The US already de-facto has this, the better you do in K-12, the better the options presented to you for post-secondary school choices. Class rank and standardized-test scores are weighed.

Not necessarily. I was misdiagnosed as being mentally retarded and spent eight years in special ed classes. I graduated the eighth grade with a college-level reading comprehension and fifth grade skills in everything else. I never went to high school. After two years in the construction trades, I enrolled in the community college as an adult and took four years to get my A.A. degree in General Education. Although I transferred to the university, I got kicked out the following year because I was tired of school and played too much Magic: The Gathering card game.

A decade later I went back to community college to learn computer programming, taking two classes per semester and working 80 hours a week as a video game tester. Five years later I got my A.S. degree and made the president's list for maintaining a 4.0 GPA in my major.

Quite the opposite, if ANYONE can get in and your budget is not dependent on parents' willingness to continue paying you, what comes out of your uni is usually a lot better in quality. Because you have zero incentive to keep the duds in the game just 'cause their parents are pumping money into your diploma mill. On the other hand, you have all the incentive to get rid of as man of the (many, many) idiots as possible so you can spend your resources on the students that are actually worth it.

I went to a large private university, and know for a FACT (I worked for one of the deans as a student assistant & screened his email for him) that they intentionally admitted students whom they knew were dumb as rocks, but had wealthy parents. Why? They were profitable. They paid full tuition, never went to class (making class sizes appear smaller for all but the first week and final exam), and added very little to the workload of professors (because they never did their assignments).

And in the US, many people would be better off steered toward the trades. A journeyman plumber or electrician will be making good money during what would have been the college years and will continue to make even better money afterward.

I recently had a discussion with a contractor doing some work in our offices. I basically had to escort the guy all day. He was lamenting how difficult it is to get apprentices. He says he tries to make people understand that once you make journeyman you can make a decent living as an electrician and once you make master you can earn six figures. You learn a lucrative trade without incurring one cent in educational debt and they pay you from day one. According to him, they typically have something like half

If you intervene educationally at a Pre-K level and during K-12, you do a lot to equalize the playing-field across lines that historically have seen a lot of variation across different groups.

Trouble is, it's expensive to start early Pre-K at three where the kids are actually subject to a real curriculum, and it's expensive to run after-school programs for those kids in all-day school once they hit kindergarten or first grade. Unfortunately it's also expensive to not educate children in these age groups, a

I don't know that throwing money at it will help, as that the problem is for many of these kids, their parents don't give a shit about getting them educated, or the culture in those neighborhoods, is that if you're trying to gain an education, you're trying to "be white", and that is found upon, etc. Socially, the culture they cultivate is almost in many cases, anti-education.

Money won't solve that, it has to somehow be a group mind think change.

Bingo. The education establishment alongside the Department of Education in this country since at least the 80's has pushed college as the be all panacea with those unable to make it into college as some sort of fuck up. Trade schools have been consistently sneered at.

The German student needs to perform well academically to get their free ride college education.

What is your definition of "performing well academically"? Because unless I misunderstood the German tertiary education sector, if your statement is applicable at all, you need to set a very low bar for "performing well", basically to the extent of insufficient performance being equivalent to studying substantially longer than usual. I think it's more than one extra year of studies or something like that.

from all the stories i've heard of Europe there are a few national universities and one or two city universities in each city. doing well academically means you ace the junior or senior year exams that make the SAT look like a play date

my guess is something like the top 20% of the students go on to college and the rest you GTFO school, learn a trade and do whatever you can and unlike the USA you're forever locked out of the jobs that will require a degree from a good school.

from all the stories i've heard of Europe there are a few national universities and one or two city universities in each city. doing well academically means you ace the junior or senior year exams that make the SAT look like a play date

If this is your definition of "doing well academically", then it doesn't apply for tuition-free studies in Germany. Or rather, it's obviously a sufficient but not a necessary requirement.

It is a bit complicated. After passing the 12th grade (that is only available at the most advanced types of schools) one can study at an university of applied science. Then there is a certain final exam (das Abitur). Used to be available only after passing the 13th grade and a lot of qualifications during the 11th-13th grade, but a few years ago the secondary school was capped ad the 12th grade. This final exam is the entrance exam to a German university (there is a lesser form of it that requires only one

No, the real problem is that the government backs student loans in the US and has essentially no criteria for denying anyone a loan. You're a D student and want a $50,000 loan to study Underwater Basket Weaving? No problem! And the university will absolutely let you in because you're bringing that $50,000 check.

And since you're not really equipped to tell the difference between a quality education and a mediocre education, and it's all pretty well fine anyway (an undergraduate education is pretty much the same reasonable quality at any given state university), you're making your decision about where to go based on the amenities. When I went to college 20 years ago the dorms were little better than minimum security prison cells and the parking authority was run out of a double wide trailer. Today at my alma mater there's a shiny new glass and steel building for the parking administration and the dorms look like condos and there are two "wellness centers" whatever the fuck those are, and the rec facilities are top notch, etc. They've turned the schools into luxury education resorts.

The education isn't any different, but it costs 4 times as much. The only way to end the cycle is for the government to stop giving students so much "free" money, but that will never happen because the University Industrial Complex will nuke any politician who tries as being "against education," and since I'm sure "low income and minority students will be hit hardest" they'll call you racist to boot.

I think the way the education bubble will actually pop is this. "Everybody knows" a diploma is next to meaningless because if you show up with enough money and stick around long enough you get one, and it doesn't mean you actually know the subject. Young people are especially aware of this, and that you can educate yourself just about as well on the internet these days. Someone from the generation that understands this is going to finally get a hiring position at a major company and is going to say "no, we don't want people with college degrees. I want someone who's educated themselves because they knew the college system was a scam. We're going to implement a system to find and hire these self-starters because they will be better employees." This will become all the rage and while that won't do anything about some professions where you MUST have the sheepskin (medicine, law) it will absolutely lay waste to the diploma mills.

I'm ALL for standardized testing in America where it has true consequences for the student.

I am against standardized testing of student. But not for the reasons you might think.

1) Standardized testing isn't about students, it is about educators.2) Standardized testing is a holdover to standardized education (Industrial). We are no longer in industrial society, and our ancient educational processes need updating... big time3) Standardized testing fails because it doesn't affect grades, so by the time kids reach Jr High, they stop caring and don't even bother trying

Still, it's WAY different than in the US. Over here in Europe, nobody is holding your hand. Find your courses, find out where you're supposed to be when or as much as anyone there cares, get run over by a bus.

If there's one thing you learn at uni over here it's organization. Either you know how to get shit done when you have a degree over here, or you know how to make others do your work. So you're perfect for tech or management positions.:)

Germany tried education partially paid by the students and that student loan crap between 2000 and 2010 or so thanks to the overabundance of free market fundamentalists in the government. The result was a miserable failure and now they (the tutution fees and some of the free market fundamentalists) are gone. Good riddance.

If you want the free experience that you get in Germany then go to your local community college. Most offer degrees of multiple levels and are free or nearly free.
Also there are plenty of other methods to pay for the non-community college experience be ISAs, agreeing to work at some location for a period of time or public service. People enter into those loans because they of the financial benefits they gain from them.

That's fairly typically for most schools. If night classes are taught, classes are between 6PM and 10PM. The time between 3PM and 5PM is when most teachers and administrators are having meetings.

Isn't that exactly the type of wasteful behavior which attributes to higher costs? If for instance classrooms were at 50% utilization for two hours between 8-5, just because everyone is doing meetings at the same time, you could reduce the number of classrooms by 10% if you simply spread meetings throughout the day.

Isn't that exactly the type of wasteful behavior which attributes to higher costs?

When do you expect the janitors to clean up the classrooms? From the campuses I've been on, 3PM to 5PM is when the janitors are cleaning up the classrooms.

[...] you could reduce the number of classrooms by 10% [...]

Classrooms or classes? I don't expect many administrators are eager to take a bulldozer to reduce classrooms. Classes are dependent on enrollments and each class requires a minimum of 20 students to qualify for state funding in California. When healthcare became the new money major after the dot com bust, I couldn't take some programming courses because I

20 years ago, I went to a school that was ridiculously expensive for it's time ($25k a year- I had scholarships or I wouldn't have gone), I witnessed all kinds of waste. They did publish where they spent money though so it was obvious where there was waste, I bet they don't now. They keep asking for money donations, but I remember how they wasted it when I was there- no chance in hell I'm giving them more money now.

A simple 3ft brick sign that cost $50,000 (this in a school of only 2000 students- so that

Just get rid of student loans. Scholarships and so on are fine - they work in numerous countries that don't have such expensive education costs since they tend to limited in scope and not unbounded.

Student loans on the other hand, seem to be designed to increase the price of education. Remember US banks were just fine with loaning out millions of dollars to people with no income and no job to buy overprices houses, what do you think they are going to do when the government makes loans they make to students almost impossible to discharge. And the banks know the government will bail them out just like every other time if the shit really hits the fan.

Of course colleges are going to be jacking up prices. As long as the banks keep loaning enough to the students to pay them. Why would they leave that money on the table - the student is the one who gets screwed not the college after all.

This would do the exact opposite of improving access to higher education, which is the primary reason these higher costs are a problem in the first place.

The rising cost of education is little different than the rising cost of health care, and one problem they both share is a lack of transparent information. The federal government has the ability to track the ROI for every college degree from every university. They could give a salary histogram for each university for each major. They could allow prospectiv

The financial bubble that has been created is bad enough. But what I think is even worse are the social problems that it has caused.

In the past, before these subsidies that distorted the pricing so horrendously, most students had to study something that brought real value. While a few dicked around in an abstract, rather useless subject like philosophy, most students studied science, engineering, mathematics, law, and medicine. These are the sorts of subjects that allow the students to, in the future, provi

"These are the sorts of subjects that allow the students to, in the future, provide real value to society."

I started as a philosophy major. I believe that major would bring real value to society. However, it wouldn't bring real value to *ME* which became an issue when I started to consider marriage and a family one day. I therefore switched my major to mathematics and moved in to a CS degree by the time I finished.

Guess what? I continued studying philosophy and moved to history on my own. I actually ma

Fun fact: You can get out of college debt free or with very limited debt by WORKING while you go to college, get your undergrad done at community college and spread your 4-year degree over about 8 years. You then get to start your life maybe 4 years later but without a decade or two of crushing debt.

While true, this is an overly conservative approach which is unlikely to benefit you in the long run (other than the community college part). Missing out on four years of earning college level wages, and losing four additional years of experience in your industry, is far more damaging financially than student loans.

But we've seen the opposite happen since this flood of subsidy money into education. We've seen entire degree programs built upon what would have once just been a course or two within a general history degree. We're talking about things like "Gender Studies", "Indigenous Peoples Studies", "Art History", and "Social Justice Philosophy".

This is more of a problem than you even consider now. Because these people will hit the job market and realize that they are essentially unemployable. At the same time, how do I phrase that friendly... people who study this as a major usually belong to a rather vocal group.

In other words, just wait 'til there is suddenly a demand to create a law that corporations have to hire a "Gender Officer". I'd expect that to happen within the next 5 years.

But we've seen the opposite happen since this flood of subsidy money into education.

There is no flood. There is actually an anti-flood.

Tuition at University of California schools used to be free for in-state students. Then UCs started charging "fees" that could easily be paid for by working over the summer. Then UCs started charging tuition....in the 1970s.

That is the timeframe you claim a lack of subsidies caused people to get "good" degrees.

First, all college/university graduates earn more during their lifetime. Including people with "Gender Studies" and "Art History" degrees.

Second, we produce 70,000 more STEM graduates every year than STEM jobs are created, even after accounting for retiring of older workers. So that "good" degree you cite is frequently just as useful as a "Gender Studies" degree when it comes to economic and productivity increases. Because those people with a CS degree that can't find work will be working at Starbucks just like the Gender Studies students.

For example, now society needs to deal with "protesters" who riot and loot any time that the police need to reasonably defend themselves with force when faced with violent attacks by criminal elements

The 1960s existed. You might wanna take off the rose-colored glasses long enough to notice the riots.

Yet there's silence from these same "protesters" when black-on-black violence kills more people in a single weekend in Chicago alone than have been killed by the police over the past decade.

The people committing that violence are not hired by the government to perform that violence. In addition, they are overwhelmingly likely to be convicted, unlike police officers who kill unarmed people who are not threatening the officer.

While there is, I think some merit to studying in groups of colleagues and live interactions, the content of all college course taught by the best instructirs using a range of teach styles will all be online in 20 years. This will be the last generation to pay for college.

I went back to school to learn computer programming on a $3,000 tax credit that George W. signed into law after 9/11. The cost of my A.S. degree was entirely FREE. I went from working 80 hours as a video game tester to making more money working 40 hours in IT support. Now I pay more in taxes than I ever did before.